DVD playback problem - part 2

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

OK, as you know we have released your special build of StarBurn which I have confirmed fixes the IFO patching problem I was previously having. However I have two customers who are still having trouble with DVDs burned using our software who do not have trouble with the same drives, media and content when burned with Nero. One of those customers is very technically inclined and ran several test for me. In the process we discovered that ISO images created with StarBurn also have a problem even when being burned with other software. Looking at the code the only functionality the ISO creation process and the DVD burning process share is a call to StarBurn_DVDVideo_Create. After that the ISO function uses a loop and calls to StarBurn_DVDVideo_Read to write the image to the hard drive, while the burn function uses StarBurn_CdvdBurnerGrabber_TrackAtOnceFromTree to burn the data directly to a DVD. So it appears that the UDF image being built by the StarBurn_DVDVideo_Create function is somehow to blame for causing certain DVD players to reject these disks. One customer says that instead of playing the DVD as a DVD video disk his player actually treats it like a data disk and plays the VOB files as if they were just MPEGs. The other says that his player flashes something about invalid DVD and then just bombs out. Both users are are in the UK and are using PAL based players if that matters.

One of these customers has uploaded ISO images of the same content created with both Nero and our StarBurn based burner to our FTP. If you want I can send those to you so maybe you can compare them and see what's different between the files that might cause the problem. I ran WinDiff on the files contained inside the ISOs and they are identical, however the ISO images themselves are not. I also burned each to a DVD and compared them using all the disk tools I have available to me, which are few, but I don't see any difference. I'm hoping that maybe you have something a little more low level that might be able to tell what's different and why it would cause a problem.

Dan

aaron (staff) · **Posted:** Tue Jan 15, 2008 11:07 am

We'd take a look at your images immediately after you'll provide us with the valid ftp account information.

Dan203 wrote:

OK, as you know we have released your special build of StarBurn which I have confirmed fixes the IFO patching problem I was previously having. However I have two customers who are still having trouble with DVDs burned using our software who do not have trouble with the same drives, media and content when burned with Nero. One of those customers is very technically inclined and ran several test for me. In the process we discovered that ISO images created with StarBurn also have a problem even when being burned with other software. Looking at the code the only functionality the ISO creation process and the DVD burning process share is a call to StarBurn_DVDVideo_Create. After that the ISO function uses a loop and calls to StarBurn_DVDVideo_Read to write the image to the hard drive, while the burn function uses StarBurn_CdvdBurnerGrabber_TrackAtOnceFromTree to burn the data directly to a DVD. So it appears that the UDF image being built by the StarBurn_DVDVideo_Create function is somehow to blame for causing certain DVD players to reject these disks. One customer says that instead of playing the DVD as a DVD video disk his player actually treats it like a data disk and plays the VOB files as if they were just MPEGs. The other says that his player flashes something about invalid DVD and then just bombs out. Both users are are in the UK and are using PAL based players if that matters.

One of these customers has uploaded ISO images of the same content created with both Nero and our StarBurn based burner to our FTP. If you want I can send those to you so maybe you can compare them and see what's different between the files that might cause the problem. I ran WinDiff on the files contained inside the ISOs and they are identical, however the ISO images themselves are not. I also burned each to a DVD and compared them using all the disk tools I have available to me, which are few, but I don't see any difference. I'm hoping that maybe you have something a little more low level that might be able to tell what's different and why it would cause a problem.

Dan

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

Here you go...

link was removed

Dan

aaron (staff) · **Posted:** Wed Jan 16, 2008 2:35 pm

Please do not remove the files before weekend

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

They'll be there until you're done.

Dan

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

One more point of data. This same customer used your free StarBurner program to burn a DVD using the VIDEO_TS data from a working Nero disk and it produced the same bad disk as our burner. So it's definitely something to do with StarBurn, and not any of the code on our end.

Hopefully the ISO images will point you toward the problem so we can get this fixed.

Dan

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

OK I'm looking at the files one more time in ISO buster and I noticed something...

Nero has the AUDIO_TS folder set at LBA 260 and the VIDEO_TS folder set at LBA 261. The StarBurn ISO has them reversed. The rest of the files have identical LBA values. So perhaps this is what's causing the problem?

Edit: I created an ISO using ImgBurn and it put the AUDIO_TS at LBA 260 and VIDEO_TS at LBA 261 just like Nero. So I think this really could be the issue.

Edit: One more thing. This only applies to the "ISO" section in ISO Buster. The "UDF" and "Video" sections in ISO Buster list the same LBA for all the files and folders. So it appears that the mix-up is only occurring in the ISO9660 portion of the image.

Dan

anton (staff) · **Posted:** Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:58 am

DVD players parse UDF part of the DVD-Video compilations. They are not expected to touch ISO9660 part AT ALL. If they do - it's a violation...

Of course we'll double check this as we need to work where others do

Dan203 wrote:

OK I'm looking at the files one more time in ISO buster and I noticed something...

Nero has the AUDIO_TS folder set at LBA 260 and the VIDEO_TS folder set at LBA 261. The StarBurn ISO has them reversed. The rest of the files have identical LBA values. So perhaps this is what's causing the problem?

Edit: I created an ISO using ImgBurn and it put the AUDIO_TS at LBA 260 and VIDEO_TS at LBA 261 just like Nero. So I think this really could be the issue.

Edit: One more thing. This only applies to the "ISO" section in ISO Buster. The "UDF" and "Video" sections in ISO Buster list the same LBA for all the files and folders. So it appears that the mix-up is only occurring in the ISO9660 portion of the image.

Dan

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

Could be something else. That just happens to be one thing I noticed when comparing the files on my end. Please still check out the files on your end and make sure there are no other differences.

Dan

anton (staff) · **Posted:** Fri Jan 18, 2008 9:19 am

Yes of course! We'll finish some nasty things here and turn back to DVD compatiblitity issue. You're currenntly second customer (first one is from India) having such a problem.

Dan203 wrote:

Could be something else. That just happens to be one thing I noticed when comparing the files on my end. Please still check out the files on your end and make sure there are no other differences.

Dan

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

My customer, a very technical guy, ran some tests of his own and found an incompatibility in the UDF portion of the ISO. I'm going to just duplicate what he sent me so I don't mess up the explanation...

Quote:

I started looking for something not obviously critical that could never the less trip DVD player software up. I found it with the dstring "VolumeSetIdentifier" within the "primary volume descriptor". All the different burners except Starburn are compliant with the UDF requirement that:

"NOTE: The intended purpose of this is to guarantee Volume Sets

with unique identifiers. The first 8 characters of the unique part

should come from a CS0 hexadecimal representation of a 32-bit

time value. The remaining 8 characters are free for implementation

use."

With Starburn they have simply repeated the volume identifier in this field and as a result they have values in the first 8 bytes that are outside the valid hex range.

So it looks like you guys are not setting the VolumeSetIdentifier value correctly. Perhaps that's causing the problem?

Dan

anton (staff) · **Posted:** Fri Jan 18, 2008 8:45 pm

DVD Verified does not complain... OK, I'll change the code to see the difference on your customer's machines.

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

OK my customer is really digging into this problem now. He's apparently some sort of engineer and he's downloaded the UDF specification and found the following error in the StarBurn ISO...

Quote:

In accordance with the spec, the strings (from all my test burners) are in OSTA compressed unicode format. To remove any doubt, this is stamped into the disk (by all the burners) in the "DescriptorCharacterSet" field within the "Primary Volume Descriptor. The OSTA compressed unicode format reserves the first byte of a string to identify the compression algorithm (see UDF 1.02 spec section 2.1.1) and a value of 08H indicates 1 byte per character. This means that for the Starburn disks the 16 bytes they write is actually 15 characters plus the compression identifier byte. By contrast Nero always writes 17 bytes comprising a compression identifier and 16 characters. In this way Nero meets the minimum UDF requirement of 16 characters and Starburn does not.

I appreciate that this might seem to be a trivial non-compliance but given that most peoples DVD players work OK then it is almost certainly something trivial we are looking for.

Hopefully that makes sense to you because he's now gone way beyond my knowledge of the process.

Dan

anton (staff) · **Posted:** Sat Jan 19, 2008 10:10 pm

Thanks for this info as well. I'll proceed with the DVD playback issue next week. Will keep you updated of course

Dan203 · **Joined:** Thu Apr 27, 2006 12:32 am **Posts:** 99

Any update on this?

Dan

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DVD playback problem - part 2

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